1. News In Design Niche

There was huge buzz around SmashingMag when they asked for help and redirected all their posts to sales page. Such move of course got big attention, many opinions and a lot of loyal readers responded! For me it was interesting experiment from SmashingMag side, however I am not sure if they were expecting such attention, but discussion evolved. Visit their article and few more articles discussing this topic and sharing interesting opinions:

New premium design resource toolbox site launched by Spyrestudios. Read what they are saying about themselves: “MediaLoot was created by Jon and Mason because they got tired of buying dozens of individual graphic resources. It was their dream to build a single collection of awesome resources that would be the ultimate designer toolbox.” I think their product is great success already!

Adobe Creative Suite CS5 will launched on Monday, April 12,2010!! Get some sneak peek videos about all suite softwares and also read comprehensive article from DesignShack just about new Photoshop – Photoshop CS5: A Sneak Peek to learn more.

In two years one gathers more than just days and months. Visit their site to see collection of events, facts, impressions, gigabytes, followers, links, features, countries & a lot more in the first BSA infographic.

In May 1, 2010 we can await for new release from WordPress announcing version 3.0. What changes and improvements we can expect? Ready for some sneak peek insight? In screenshot below you can see new WordPress default theme called “Twenty Ten”. Read more in original article!

Brian Mclovin is going mad into interviews, he will do 55 interviews in upcoming months. Head out to his site to 26 interviews already, I am reading each interview with excitement. While you are on his site, I suggest you to read also Killing The List Post article and discussion in comments.

Learn how to take good things from 960 Grid system and other CSS frameworks, but to remember about clean code in the same time too. Frameworks always offer more, because it is meant to cover almost everything you could use – understand what it represents and what you really need to use!

If you want to create unique wp themes, it’s necessary to know how to call out different arrangements of posts from WordPress database. Read this article for learning what query_posts command in WordPress is and how to use it in your upcoming theme.

5. Social Media, SEO

“I don’t get why people invest in SEO. I am not trying to start an argument. I just want to explain my doubts so somebody can correct me.” – interesting way of thinking from Paul Boag and I completely agree with him – read there why you don’t need to invest big money in SEO, why it’s just not worth it.

Find several Facebook fan pages and communities now and also read several short tips how to promote your Facebook page. By the way, 1STWD has it’s own fan page as well, we are not promoting it a lot for now though

6. Coding Resources, Examples:

This version takes form in CSS. All shapes are rendered by the browser, using a combination of background color, border width, border radius, and a heavily reliance on absolute/relative positioning. You can get a better idea of how the letters were formed with the Inspect display option.

This is a pretty handy tool for bookmarklets that need jQuery to execute their function. It helps in situations where you don’t know if the specific minimum required version of jQuery will already load in the page.

Speckyboy always offer great and useful list articles, which can help greatly in your daily development process. Need some help with jQuery in order to remember some short code snippets or read guides as references?

7. Graphic Design

Have you wanted to learn more about color correction? The focus of this tutorial is to help you delve deeper into color correcting to up the production value of your images. Learn a few simple techniques while creating.

Get a handy collection of free templates to help you in wireframing, print sketching and with taking notes. Must bookmark! Update – Sketchbooks of Web Developer, one more excellent article with different approach and showcase.